Stories

Last week’s launch of a print-only newspaper excited journalists – but is it sustainable in a digitised consumer world?

When I started my newspaper career in the late nineties ‘digital’ was called ‘the bloody internet’.

“Forget about the bloody internet,” my ink-stained tabloid boss would argue, before resting his case on some surreal, qualitative Hollywood evidence: “What’s Harrison Ford reading at the beginning of Blade Runner, eh? I’ll tell you – he’s reading a newspaper, he’s not surfing the bloody internet!”

Ink will always course through the veins of the newspaper industry and so too thankfully will the instinct to hunt and tell compelling stories.

New Day, the duck-egg blue-top, is a defiant yell at the bloody internet and aims to tell the biggest stories of the day, solely for a print-friendly audience.

Life’s short, let’s live it well, is the slogan of the new tabloid newspaper, aimed, in between hyphens, at 35-55-year-old, time-poor, glass-half-full people, according to editor Alison Phillips.

We won’t know for sure about the sales figures until May’s ABC report but speculation is febrile in the journalist community that sales were dropping by the third day at a rate of 4%, based on a dip in sales from 153,000 last Tuesday to 148,000 by the end of its first Wednesday, according to unofficial industry estimates in The Guardian.

The fast-paced title may not be shooting to stardom with its audience just yet but it has surely beaten all records for the shortest time taken to get its own Private Eye column.

The helium-fused, relentlessly upbeat tone of New Day’s 40 pages conjures Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’s The Day Today, bandying about preposterous labels like ‘sportopinioneers‘ on its back pages.

New Day has been inspired by market research into lapsed newspaper buyers, 1 million of them, according to Trinity Mirror chief executive, Simon Fox.

The research, he maintains, shows that although media consumption habits are driven by digital and social media-distributed news, there is a sizeable bunch of readers out there who still crave a printed news product, in between Facebook Like-athons.

However, media consumption is a two-, sometimes three-way street in 2016 – a conversation between content provider, advertiser and consumers, not always inclusively.

Connecting with the reader through social, mobile and online touchpoints is the single-most brilliant opportunity for media owners to stem the haemorrhaging flow of advertising losses, £121m, all told, in 2015.

The latest research from the Ericsson Consumerlab shows it’s not just advertisers and media owners who benefit from a deeper digital dialogue.

Ericsson tracked 100,000 consumers and their media journeys to reveal an emerging habit called place and device shifting. It’s about individuals keeping focused on the same piece of content best suited to their location, across TV, iPad, mobile and portable devices.

The research revealed that media consumers were lost in the jungle of stuff to watch. Within this dilemma comes a plethora of personal data issues. Mediacells calls it the Doh! And the Woh! effects.

Obvious Netflix recommendations e.g. ‘We recommend you watch Series 4 of House of Cards, based on your watching House of Cards Series 3′. Doh! Or the creepier suggestions which are spookily accurate and resonate with consumers, but not in a good way. Woh!

Mediacells sees this as the main opportunity for publishers, broadcasters, brands and agencies to interact in a transparent, meaningful way with their audiences, fans, customers and users. It’s about creating a kind of personal data quid pro quo with the audience providing personal information to get to right content for them, where and when they want it.

The opt-in mechanic in this dialogue empowers the consumer and deepens their trust in selected brands.

Ericsson claims 1 in 4 consumers are willing to provide more personal data in order to receive greater accuracy around recommendations on what media to consume and where.

This fresh dialogue relies on behavioural tracking as well as up to date, accurate personal information which is actively, knowingly offered by the audience.

The research which informed Trinity Mirror to fill the gap created by the exiting Independent has left in the printed newspaper market is like the Turbo Start function on Mario Kart – it will fuel and energise players but only for a short distance.

The level of consumer insight that advertisers and consumers are increasingly demanding can only be achieved with distributed connections through, say, a newspaper’s website, app, social media accounts and its print products too.

I often wanted to counter my old tabloid boss by asserting that Harrison Ford might have been reading a newspaper at the beginning of Blade Runner but there was no newspaper to be seen by the end; only carnage. But then he would have ripped me a new orifice, digitally. @BradCRees